


a trick of the light

by karples



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/M, One-Sentence Story, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 09:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12603796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karples/pseuds/karples
Summary: ...since tomorrow’s an impassive one-way train hurtling through the dark on tracks that you hammered down yourself, and once it’s here to carry you away you can’t ever turn back...





	a trick of the light

**Author's Note:**

> title from "better lead than dead" by ted leo and the alchemists.

Roy breaks up with Donna or Donna breaks up with Roy, he can't tell which, and when he revisits the question over one shot too many he can’t make up his mind, because it’s the chicken or the egg all over again, wondering if Donna broke up with him or if _he_ inadvertently broke up with Donna because he’d fucked up somehow and planted a ticking time bomb, kickstarting the slow-motion necrosis of their teenage dream, unaware that the egg would hatch a break-up instead of a chicken or a future, which he really shouldn’t have looked forward to anyway since tomorrow’s an impassive one-way train hurtling through the dark on tracks that you hammered down yourself, and once it’s here to carry you away you can’t ever turn back, so dead chickens with snapped necks stay dead and broken relationships can’t crawl back into the womb where they’d once glowed with potential, so ripe, so fruitful, so promising, like children when they’re still ideas and not real fucking people with flaws, like the unanswerable was-it-my-fault in its hypothetical maybe-it-could've-been-different box, or maybe the box is the glistening glass in Roy’s hand and the question is how much vodka’s left in the bottle that he pilfered from the alcohol cabinet, how far and deep he can swim, how long he can hold his breath before he inevitably resurfaces to an earthquake pounding in his temples, ambushed by the need for the pinch of a needle in the crook of his arm, resisting and resisting until he can’t and caves to the craving, much like the way the skin surrenders under the proboscis of the twenty-nine gauge syringe that delivers his latest chemical fix, sending him soaring rapturous and heavenward through the fine branching fissures in the plaster ceiling of the apartment, also cold, also empty, also haunted by too many closets full of suits tailored to the body of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, none of which Roy will ever wear nor fit nor touch with hand nor foot nor shadow, Amen, because to try will be to find himself ill-suited, ha-ha-ha, forced to acknowledge that he doth in fact covet his neighbor’s house and his neighbor’s good fortune and his neighbor’s many happinesses when he could just deny, deny, and deny, hoping that maybe he could salvage a part of his life if he loved Donna well, if he loved Donna right, if he loved Donna hard and unambivalent and uncompromising--if he alchemized his heavy heart, riddled with petty envies and insecurities, into something light--only to discover at the bitter fucking end that he’d put all of his eggs in one basket and counted ‘em before they hatched, leaving him lonely and regretful and desolate with a shot glass in one sweat-slick fist and, well, eggshells in the other.

**Author's Note:**

> i have ten minutes left before it's no longer 11/1, happy birthday roy harper! please have this fic i wrote nearly a year ago in a bad place.
> 
> the one-sentence story is a writing exercise a teacher had me do in high school: if i was struggling, she told me to write one massive super-long sentence without periods and see how far i could go and then read it aloud. so this is designed more to be a spoken piece than a written-and-read piece. i think i'll be doing more of these in the future, i think the flow is rough! but i'm going to get better!


End file.
